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September 21 - October 19, 2017
It’s the question that is buried under almost every other question Jesus asks each of us.
Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow.
Discipleship, we might say, is a way to curate your heart,
We are not just static containers for ideas; we are dynamic creatures directed toward some end.
A second theme worth noting is Augustine’s locating of the center or “organ” of this teleological orientation in the heart, the seat of our longings and desires.
The longing that Augustine describes is less like curiosity and more like hunger—less like an intellectual puzzle to be solved and more like a craving for sustenance (see Ps. 42:1–2).
More than that, I long for some end.
human beings are fundamentally erotic creatures.
Instead of setting up a false dichotomy between agape and eros, we could think of agape as rightly ordered eros: the love of Christ
To be human is to have a heart. You can’t not love. So the question isn’t whether you will love something as ultimate; the question is what you will love as ultimate.
You can’t not be headed somewhere. We live leaning forward, bent on arriving at the place we long for.
our telos is what we want, what we long for, what we crave.
That’s why there’s something ultimate about this vision: to be oriented toward some sense of the good life is to pursue some vision of how the world ought to be.
We adopt ways of life that are indexed to such visions of the good life, not usually because we “think through” our options but rather because some picture captures our imagination.
We get pulled into a way of life that seems to be the way to arrive in that world. Such a telos works on us, not by convincing the intellect, but by allure.
We are lovers first and foremost.
longings of the heart both point us in the direction of a kingdom and propel us toward it.
You are what you love because you live toward what you want.
Things which are not in their intended position are restless. Once they are in their ordered position, they are at rest.
Our orienting loves are like a kind of gravity—carrying us in the direction to which they are weighted.
Discipleship should set us on fire, should change the “weight” of our love.
To be human is to be a lover and to love something ultimate.
love as we’re talking about it here—love as our most fundamental orientation to the world—is less a conscious choice and more like a baseline inclination, a default orientation that generates the choices we make.
Consider how he exhorts the Christians in Colossae: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity” (Col. 3:12–14).
While we have a vague sense that virtue is an ethical category, we don’t have a classical understanding of the concept anymore,
Virtues, quite simply, are good moral habits.
as Thomas Aquinas points out, there is an inversely proportionate relationship between virtue and the law:11 the more virtuous someone is—that is, the more they have an internal disposition to the good that bubbles up from their very character—the less they need the external force of the law to compel them to do the good.
In a sense, then, to become virtuous is to internalize the law (and the good to which the law points) so that you follow it more or less automatically.
When you have acquired the sorts of virtues that are second nature, it means you have become the kind of person who is inclined to the good.
I can’t just think my way into virtue.
virtue isn’t acquired intellectually but affectively.
Learning here isn’t just information acquisition; it’s more like inscribing something into the very fiber of your being.
First, we learn the virtues through imitation.
we are exhorted to be imitators. “Follow my example,” Paul says, “as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1). Similarly, Paul commends imitation to the Christians at Philippi: “join together in following my example, brothers and sisters, and just as you have us as a model, keep your eyes on those who live as we do” (Phil. 3:17).
Second, acquiring virtue takes practice.
It’s like we have moral muscles
Because if you are what you love and if love is a virtue, then love is a habit. This means that our most fundamental orientation to the world—the longings and desires that orient us toward some version of the good life—is shaped and configured by imitation and practice.
discipleship is a rehabituation of your loves.
How does my love get aimed and directed?
While being human means we can’t not love something ultimate—some version of the kingdom—it doesn’t mean we necessarily love the right things, or the true King.
if the heart is like a compass, an erotic homing device, then we need to (regularly) calibrate our hearts,
We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love.
Now here’s the crucial insight for Christian formation and discipleship: not only is this learning-by-practice the way our hearts are correctly calibrated, but it is also the way our loves and longings are misdirected and miscalibrated—not
These aren’t just things we do; they do something to us.
At stake here is your very identity, your fundamental allegiances, your core convictions and passions that center both your self-understanding and your way of life.
to say “you are what you love” is synonymous with saying “you are what you worship.”
We become what we worship because what we worship is what we love.
John Calvin refers to the human heart as an “idol factory.”
Instead of being on guard for false teachings and analyzing culture in order to sift out the distorting messages, we need to recognize that there are rival liturgies everywhere.
The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious.
